Judas Horse

by April Smith

  The bandit holds up the bag of tricks. “Who wants it?”

  Slammer: “Me!”

  Perversely, Stone hands the bag to Sara instead, watching the disappointment grow once again in Slammer’s face. But then, another whiplash turn of mood, and he offers the boy a Colt .45 pistol.

  Like the scenario in undercover school, reality shifts to a perilous key. A screaming siren wakes me from this loopy daze. The kid is armed.

  Slammer handles the gun. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Figure it out, genius.” Stone gives me the video camera and unlocks the doors. “You have three minutes. Go.”

  We scamper down the driveway, past a couple of bicycles and a redwood tree house with swings, along a path to the backyard. A raccoon darts from the shadows. The yard is open, no cover. We hunker against the garage wall.

  Sara, indignant: “Why’d he give you the gun?”

  “Because you’re a pussy.”

  You can see the weed shining through Sara’s huge eyes. “He wants you to shoot Laumann?”

  “Let’s do it.” Slammer pushes unsteadily off the wall.

  I grab his arm. “No! They have an alarm system,” I say, pointing to random telephone wires.

  But Slammer is hyped. “Two more minutes! All we’ve got!”

  Absurdly, he gets on his belly and combat-crawls across the lawn. Seems like a plan, so I follow. Sara’s behind us, dragging the bag of tricks. This is good. We’re leaving loads of evidence—footprints, fibers off our clothes. Then the lights go on and figures appear in the downstairs windows.

  “Freeze!” Slammer hisses.

  We are too far away to make the people out.

  “Get the video!”

  Lying down in the sharp, wet Bermuda grass, zooming in on Herbert Laumann’s family through the camera lens, we discover a mother, father, and baby girl. The baby is sleeping on the mother’s shoulder. She walks up and down as the father yawns, rubbing his temples with two flat palms. They are all wearing nightclothes. The mother has a towel over her shoulder, on which the infant’s cheek is resting, blue-eyed slits staring into babyland.

  Slammer says, “Babylon nation, prepare to die.”

  The mother sits slowly at a table, balancing carefully to keep the baby still, as the father talks. His ordinary white bureaucratic all-American face—the face of evil—looks collapsed with exhaustion. He reaches out to touch the baby’s head—a cupped hand, a blessing.

  “Are you really going to do it?” Sara whispers, mesmerized by the family on the tiny video screen, like a snow globe showing a scene of mystery and magic. In its light, a tiny floating square of light in acres of pitch-black farmland, the youngsters without a home and the spy with a soul of ash are watching transfixed, through a secret window, the simple arithmetic of two loving parents and a child. You would think they had never seen such a thing.

  Prone, Slammer tries to sight the gun on wobbling elbows. He should take a lesson from Sterling McCord. The gun quivers.

  “Wait!” I say, allegedly watching through the camera. “You don’t have a shot.”

  “I have it,” he grunts, but he lays the gun down to wipe his sweating palms on the wet grass.

  I am a millisecond from disarming him.

  He picks up the weapon but doesn’t shoot. The gun is shaking wildly. Comically. This is not surprising. In real wars, there are troops on the battlefield who refuse to fire, because they can’t. Unlike the movies, it doesn’t come naturally, killing another human being.

  “Three minutes are way up,” I say gently. “We’re out of here.”

  Slammer slumps down to the grass and sobs. Helpless, deep, undifferentiated sobs. I lift the gun away.

  Sara strokes his bristly head, then kneels and awkwardly puts her arms around his shoulders, laying her cheek on his back.

  “Allfather will be mad,” she whispers.

  “He can fuck himself,” Slammer replies.

  I erase the videotape.

  Twenty-six

  The following day, Slammer walks into the kitchen, to find Dick Stone sitting at the sloping counter with the broken tiles, reading the daily fish report—how many chinook salmon and steelhead have passed through the bypass systems of the lower Columbia River dams—and holding the Colt .45.

  The gun is aimed at the doorway. At the next person to walk through the doorway, who would be Slammer, back from the grocery store.

  The devil boy stops in his tracks.

  “What up?”

  “You tell me.”

  The gun is pointed at Slammer’s belly.

  “What?” Slammer shrugs and grins foolishly, as if missing the joke. “Can I at least put the groceries down?”

  Slammer notices his voice has grown small. Besides the black hole of the barrel, Dick Stone is showing him the Look. Slammer, Sara, and I have talked about the Look. You can’t see his eyes when he does it: narrows them to a pair of emotionless chinks that the angry part of him seems to be just gazing through, like the faceless column of light that pulses behind the crack in the TV cabinet where the doors don’t shut. You have no idea what’s on. When Stone hunkers in like that, the worst part is the excruciating silent anticipation, because you know he’s slowly taking in your worthless mistakes and calculating the punishment. “The tax,” he likes to say.

  Slammer lowers the grocery bags, shoulders aching, as if he’d been holding sacks of rocks.

  “What’d I do?”

  Slammer is drowning in panic. He is seventeen years old, a long way from last night’s tears, but the memory of terror is right there.

  “Just tell me what I did wrong, okay? So we can talk about it maybe.”

  The terror comes from Slammer’s incarceration in the Mississippi Training School, the type of state-run correctional institution for juveniles where they strip you naked and throw you in a freezing cell, hogtie you, and withhold medical care. Slammer had a toothache so bad and so unattended, the abscess ate into his jaw. He was put there in sixth grade for being chronically late to his regular school. This was because his birth mother was an alcoholic and slept all day. When he was released, he hitchhiked west to live with his father. The Mississippi Training School is currently under federal investigation.

  “You did not complete the mission,” Stone replies, “you ungrateful little shit.” Now his eyes seem pinched and tired.

  “I am grateful. You got me off the streets, man.” He bounces around the kitchen, flinging his arms.

  “I gave you a job, to kill Herbert Laumann,” Stone says philosophically. “You failed.”

  “Hey, I’m still up for the Big One.”

  Slammer thinks he is showing loyalty by endorsing the bandit’s mysterious plan—“the Big One” that will “bring down the house.” Now he takes up another of the bandit’s themes.

  “I didn’t do it because the FBI is watching us, dude. They’re tapping our phones, following us around—”

  “Someone surely is. But the larger point I’m trying to get at,” Stone says, “is that people around here do what I tell them to.”

  Discipline.

  “Of course. That’s a given.” Slammer smiles with fine white teeth. The sight of his smile is beautiful and rare, like an eagle in flight. “You’re the Allfather.”

  “I gave you a gun,” he says. “I gave you my trust. You abused it.”

  “They weren’t home!” Slammer protests, thick lips blubbering. “I would’ve done it—but they weren’t home!”

  “Come with me. I am the tax collector,” Stone says.

  “Hey, what about the ice cream?”

  “Put the ice cream away.”

  Slammer may be wildly thinking of attack or escape, but in the end, he goes quietly. The bandit did not even have to show the gun.

  It is dark when Sara and I get back from picking Megan up from the airport after Lillian’s memorial service. We took along a new black-and-white kitten we’d adopted in order to cheer Megan up. I am driving. I take my eyes from t
he road for an instant—to smile at Sara’s pretty profile as she teases the little guy with a tassel on her bag—when she looks up and shrieks, “Oh my God!” and I slam the brakes.

  The tires kick up gravel and the pickup fishtails to a stop. In the white glare of the headlights we see Slammer’s head sticking out of a hole in the ground, in which Dick Stone is burying him up to the neck.

  Slammer’s garish face is red and contorted and stained with tears. At eye level with the chassis of the truck, he has been screaming for us to stop.

  We rush out of the car like fiends let loose, washed out almost to transparency by the hot light, all three of us shouting and reaching through ribbons of iridescent dust to stop it, stop him.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Megan bellows at Stone as I grab for the shovel.

  “He’s a traitor.”

  We wrestle for the handle, and he’s strong, flailing wildly, like someone beating at the bars that imprison them.

  “I gave him a gun. He didn’t do the job.”

  “What job?” Megan cries, pulling futilely on his shirt. “What job? What job?”

  “The boy has turned on me,” says Stone. “The FBI is all around us. What is he? A cocksucking little wimp ass piece of shit.”

  “Talk to me, Julius,” I gasp, watching Sara emerging from the dark with a heavy pitchfork. “What do you want?”

  Stone’s voice has dropped to a mocking growl. “Tell them about the atrocities. Tell them about the lies.”

  “Help me,” Slammer sobs, twisting futilely in his grave.

  Sara tries to dig the hard-packed dirt.

  Megan is still tugging on Stone’s shirt, sliding her arms around him from behind. “It’s safe,” she croons. “We’re here on the farm and we’re safe. Let’s calm down.”

  Stone’s is the grating voice of madness, coming from a hollow gourd: “Direct action is nothing to take lightly. Government lackeys have to die.”

  My hands still grip the shovel. “Government lackeys like Herbert Laumann?”

  “I want Laumann to die like a pig. Cut his throat, cut it like a pig’s—”

  “He can’t hear you,” Megan gasps, wild-eyed.

  Stone’s manic desperation short-circuits my ability to think. I have to fix it, take it in, do what it takes to relieve his confusion and pain, as I always did with my grandfather, Poppy.

  “All right, all right. You want Herbert Laumann dead. You’re mad at Slammer because he didn’t kill him. It’s not his fault. Leave the kid alone. He can’t do it, but I can. I’ll do it for you, Allfather. I will shoot the guy, okay? I’ll shoot him fifty-two times, until he’s dead, really dead, okay? Give it to me! I can do it.”

  He jerks the shovel away from me and raises it to strike, throwing Megan back.

  “Darcy, watch out!”

  “You’re a liar, too!” Stone tells me.

  “I will. I promise! I know what it’s like. I once killed a man.”

  Panting, we eye each other in the screaming headlights.

  “And I’ll tell you something else!” I’m pointing the finger, dancing with a kind of hysteria. “You think Slammer betrayed your trust? You are not the only one, pal. I know what that’s like, too. When someone you are stupid enough to fall in love with turns on you and completely undermines you and destroys your life and there’s no way back and you have to kill him.”

  Even through the blinding paranoid rage, he can see the truth of what I’ve done. What Darcy’s done. Stone lets the shovel drop.

  “Come on, baby,” Megan whispers. “I have you, safe and sound. Come on now. You’re with me,” and she guides him through the shadows.

  Sara and I dig Slammer out. Encrusted in damp earth for long, torturous hours, he has fouled himself.

  We help him to his feet.

  Sara is crying. Slammer’s arms are around us both, leaning heavily on our shoulders. As he walks, he sheds loose rocks and torn roots, a man so debased, he is made of dirt.

  “We can’t stay here,” Sara whispers, but then she hears the kitten crying from where it is hiding under the truck, and thinks of the orchard of hazelnut trees, and the rescued ducks and goats, and Sirocco and the white foal, Geronimo, all living peacefully on the farm. She can’t understand the contradictions.

  “God—I’m so sorry—I couldn’t see you until the last minute.” My voice is genuinely shaking. “What was he doing?”

  “He said it was a test. Of fire and ice.”

  A light is on upstairs. We move toward the house.

  Twenty-seven

  A trial of fire and ice. That’s the way you might describe my grandfather’s visit, when he flew out from California to attend my swearing-in as a new agent from the FBI Academy. Steve Crawford and I were in the same graduating class, of course, and had naïvely planned to announce to our families that we were getting married, anticipating that our excitement, on top of graduation, would make it one hell of a bang-up weekend celebration for all.

  My grandfather was booked into the Days Inn at the very same mall where I would play out Darcy’s first contact with the counterfeiters when I returned more than ten years later for undercover school. Back when Poppy stayed there, the motel was newly built and did not smell of urine under the stairs, and behind the property there was just the Dairy Queen, where I would devour that memorable double cheeseburger—not a full-blown shopping strip with a multiplex and gym.

  I spotted Poppy from the pool area, striding along the upper deck of the motel. You could tell he was in law enforcement by his sporty disregard of the surroundings (I’m here; get out of my way), an authority he always carried, licensed or not in that particular locality, as if the special nature of his calling extended worldwide supremacy to Everett Morgan Grey. Never mind the only felons were shrieking boys, cannonballing into the pool with huge atomizing splashes; my grandfather’s eyes were fixed on the door of his room with intention to prevail. He wore a white Panama hat, a brown suit, and a sport shirt open at the neck, exposing a freckled chest. His ham hand swung my mother’s old lacquered suitcase as lightly as if it still held dresses for my dolls.

  The boys charged off the edge of the pool, gleaming bellies white as those of frogs. I did not jump up and wave at my grandfather. I did not want to leave that lawn chair, ever. It wasn’t just the considerable fear of telling him about Steve, which, by extension would be a statement that I’d actually had sex with a man and was continuing to do so. Even though I had barely left the grounds of the Academy, I realized there in those hothouse corridors, I had finally seized on a clear identity, and in that clarity was liberation. I was free to fall in love, to make mistakes, be harangued and harassed, but they never shut me down. Just the sight of my grandfather threatened my new pride in being Ana; I knew he would turn my achievements into competition with him. Already I was looking back on new agent training as a bright moment of independence, in whose light I was able to shine because I had been on the other side of the country, away from Poppy.

  There was a kamikaze scream and tepid water rained on my sandals. You did not just enter Poppy’s world. You surrendered to it. I forced myself out of the chair and headed for the pool gate.

  “No running,” I told the boys.

  I knocked. The curtain peeled back and there was the man who had raised me, not giving anything to the steamy morning light but a glimpse of grizzled cheekbone and a shank of nose, squinting between the brown folds of fabric like the beat cop he had been forty years ago, cagey as ever.

  But then the door opened wide and the sun found his quick blue eyes.

  “Annie!” He grinned and crooked an elbow around my neck, pulling me close. His leathery skin smelled of barbershop spice.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “Goddamn airlines” was his reply.

  The door swung shut. He had not turned on the lights, and the suitcase sat unopened on a shiny quilted bedspread the color of ripe cherries. It occurred to me I had never been in a hotel room with my grandfather.r />
  “Want some ice?”

  “What for? It’s cold as a witch’s tit in here.”

  “Poppy. Don’t. That kind of talk exploits women,” I announced crisply.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  It didn’t matter; I liked the sound of my brave new voice. I had endured. I was almost an FBI agent. I could make pronouncements now.

  “You sure you don’t want something from the soda machine?”

  “What’s the hurry? Take a load off.”

  I plunked down on the bed. The frame wobbled like Jell-O, dipping me up and down as Poppy unpacked the old suitcase that had belonged to my mother, Gwen. It matched a makeup case she used to own, “a train case,” they called it, with unfolding trays that would rise up and present their treasures as you opened the lid. She died of liver cancer when I was fourteen. My father was an immigrant from El Salvador, a man I barely knew. I remember my mom as a passive and defeated person, but she must have had moxie to fall in love with a brown-skinned man in the 1960s. It would be years before I understood the circumstances under which my father, Miguel Sanchez, disappeared.

  At a moment like this, you crave completion—parents, aunts and uncles and cousins, noisy and embarrassing, to shower you with affirmation and envy. Steve had a ton of family coming down from West Virginia; it was unsettling to be in that ice-cold motel room with Poppy, alone.

  “So,” I asked him, “any words of wisdom as I go out into the big bad world?”

  He considered. “My father always told me, ‘Wear a rubber.’”

  “Nice.”

  “What’s the matter?” he teased. “Does that exploit women, too?”

  Just outside the window was a poisonous-looking tree with ugly hanging clusters of lavender blossoms and long green pods—something that belonged in a swamp, something out of a southern horror story, whose evil perfume had the power to put you in a stupor.

  Maybe that was it.